Phone calls on speaker, refusing to queue: Why don’t Indians respect other users of public space?

Last month I was in the business lounge at Delhi airport when the man next to me, linen shirt crisp, noise-cancelling headphones hanging around his neck like an expensive irony, spent 40 minutes on speakerphone, his business banalities booming across the room.

Nobody said anything. But a few of us exchanged the look. You know the one. Eye contact that contains an entire indictment: why are we like this, what is wrong with us, why can’t we just...not. Then we retreated back to our screens and ceded the room to the loudest man in it.

The man looked like the kind of man who probably prided himself on being well-travelled, well-resourced, frequenting Frankfurt layovers and going on Mauritius holidays. He must have opinions on single-origin coffees, and posted reels from Tokyo cafes.

Yet in shared spaces, he collapsed, like so many others. We make endless video calls drowning out restaurant diners, play reels in full-volume in lounges, or refuse to form queues with personal space as a quaint, alien notion.

We know better but choose otherwise. It’s easy to call this entitlement. But I think it is more interesting than just that.

There are the usual explanations: public space in India is treated like government property, which is to say everybody’s dumping ground. Following rules rarely rewards you while breaking them rarely has consequences.

Crowding compresses everything into survival mode; the “adjust kar lo” (you have to adjust) reflex is a rational response to scarcity. Once disorder signals that nobody is watching or cares, more disorder follows.

Sociologist Erving Goffman introduced a concept he called “civil inattention”: the invisible agreement that makes modern city life liveable. It acknowledges a stranger’s presence with a glance, then pointedly looks away, as if to say, I recognise your existence, and I will not impose mine upon yours.

It recognises a stranger as a civic equal whose claim to the public quiet is as legitimate as your own.

But in India, public space is emotionally underdeveloped. We have imported the aesthetic of cosmopolitan life before fully internalising its moral grammar. We know how to dress for the lifestyle, book the table, board the flight, but we have not fully absorbed the idea that a shared space requires shared restraint.

A lot of Indian life runs on familiarity, permission and hierarchy. One is always someone’s daughter, contact, someone above or below – social order where there are no neutral strangers. They are either invisible or relevant only if they can be categorised.

The man on the speakerphone is not being rude. Worse, he does not register that there is a you. You are not his client, his cousin, his superior or his subordinate. In a social sense, you are a non-person. Civil inattention, instead, asks that when one encounters a stranger, not to categorise them at all. That is harder than it sounds because equality in public is a form of discipline.

For people raised in a culture of little space which is contested or socially coded, this is a form of land-grabbing, securing your territory. Here, rewards accrue to the visible and the loud. Being quiet signals that you understand your place, but loudness shows you sit at the top of the hierarchy.

The person being noisy in the lounge rarely thinks of it as a form of aggression. If anything, it feels like release, a small victory over the tightness of the world: at least here, I will not be made small.

But this backfires, making public space more difficult for everyone as they retreat behind headphones, with annoyance and the glazed expression of the already defeated. Public space becomes brittle because too few of us are willing to behave as if strangers matter.

There is also something very Indian at play: the warmth towards insiders, indifference to those on the outside. We are extraordinarily hospitable to guests in our homes, generous, curious, disarmingly kind but not to the stranger on the pavement, in the queue or behind us on the flight. The kindness is relational.

Perhaps that’s why there is no answer to the question “why can’t we do better?” Visibility and adoption are different things. We can watch civil inattention work in 20 cities and still not internalise the lesson because that requires a shift in imagination.

There’s no buying a shift – neither through travel nor with money – because it requires something the Indian consumption class rarely confronts itself with: the willingness to shrink yourself a little in a shared space for someone who has no claim on you, simply because they exist.

The man in the lounge eventually finished his phone call and put his headphones back on. The lounge returned to its approximation of peace. Nobody said anything. We had all, in our different ways, adjusted.

Shagorika Heryani is the founder of Athina, a brand and cultural intelligence company.